Japanese companies made the fewest acquisitions in a decade during the first half as the yen?s volatility climbed to a four-year high, cooling buying interest.
The number of deals announced in the first half of the year was 997, with a total value of US$45.7 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
That is the lowest number of deals and value since the first six months of 2004. Total deal value is 47 percent lower from the first half of last year.
Since Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe swept into power in December last year on promises to resurrect the economy by expanding stimulus measures and weakening the yen, the Japanese currency has whipsawed between ?82.36 and ?103.21 to the US dollar. The yen?s 100-day volatility rose to 14.81 points this month, the highest since August 2009, and more than double the 6.97 figure at the start of the year.
ASSUMPTIONS
?Companies had set their budgets for the year as of April and May under certain assumptions, but they?re not sure they will hold,? said Nobuhisa Ishizuka, a Tokyo-based partner specializing in mergers at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP. ?This makes it difficult for a lot of them to pull the trigger.?
Marubeni Corp, Japan?s sixth-most acquisitive company in the last five years, last month cut the size of its purchase to buy US grain trader Gavilon Group LLC by US$1 billion from the US$3.6 billion announced in May last year by excluding the energy unit from the final agreement.
The trader said on Saturday that it paid US$2.7 billion for Gavilon in the end because of a ?purchase price adjustment,? without providing details.
Masami Iijima, chief executive officer of Mitsui & Co, Japan?s most acquisitive company in the last five years, in May said the trading house does not plan any major acquisitions that are ?significant in size.?
COOLED DEMAND
The Tokyo-based trader will focus on expanding existing assets as slowing Chinese economic growth cooled demand for commodities, Iijima said.
The total number of domestic and overseas acquisitions announced by Japanese companies in the first six months of last year was 1,167, the data show. The total deal value was US$85.5 billion, according to the data.
Overseas mergers and acquisitions by Japanese firms fell to US$10.6 billion this year from a record US$112 billion for all of last year, the data showed.
Mitsubishi Corp, the nation?s biggest trading house, announced the most deals in the first six months with 12, data show.
The biggest transaction proposed was the US$3.25 billion merger of the thermal power units of Hitachi Ltd and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd.
Japanese acquisitions abroad will recover in the second half as companies make adjustments to cope with the weaker yen, said Yuichi Jimbo, head of investment banking at Citigroup Global Markets Japan Inc in Tokyo.
The bank has some deals that may be announced before year-end, he said last month.
WWE Extreme Rules 2013 powerball winner powerball winner Eurovision Ken Venturi ben affleck doctor who
And Google Glass’ slow march toward market readiness continues. The development team shared a few details about an upcoming update on the official Glass Google+ page, and it finally unlocks some oft-requested features for all those Glass Explorers to start mucking around with. The changelog is a pretty significant one — users will soon be able to initiate calls and send messages to Gmail contacts, and rather than having to navigate to the OK Glass launcher card before issuing a voice command, users can boss their headgear around without having to touch anything. But most importantly though, Google is now letting users view webpages through Glass. The post makes it seem as though the touchpad mounted on Glass’ right side will be responsible for most of the navigation — users can swipe forward and backward along the panel to scroll up and down, and there are multiple navigation schemes to fiddle with. Thankfully, there’s one tailor-made for those who generally feel impervious to embarrassment: users can pan around their favorite websites by touching two fingers to the touchpad and moving their heads to and fro. You know, nice and discreet. It’s a little hard to visualize, but current Glass Explorers won’t have to wait too long to see it for themselves as the update is slated to go live over the next few days. Frankly, it was only a matter of time before Google let those particular cats out of the bag — we’ve known that Glass had the ability to fire up a browser and listen to voice commands outside of that launcher card ever since an enterprising developer named Zhuowei Zhang uncovered a slew of so-called Glass Lab Experiments and shared them on GitHub. Naturally, there’s still plenty on that list that hasn’t been publicly implemented yet (think video stabilization and a Cliplet feature that records short snippets of video, to name a few), so expect a boatload of new updates between now and Glass’ tentative release date later this year.
After topping 180 million downloads, the 
The camp for children ages 8-14 will be held? July 22-26 from 9 a.m. until noon at the church. Coach Roger Dutremble of Global Sports Outreach will teach kids the fundamentals of basketball and Biblical awareness.